Naked Prey

7

FREE OF LETTY and her mother, Lucas and Del caucused at the cars. "Moose Bay?" Del asked.

"That's a big topic," Lucas said. "Why don't we talk to this Calb guy?"

They both looked across the highway at the yellow metal buildings with the trucks parked out front, and Del nodded.

Calb had two buildings, an auto-body and tow building, and a truck-rehab building, connected by an unheated shed-like walkway. They went into the auto-body building, which consisted of a small office and a series of repair bays at the back; a woman in the office directed them through the walkway to the truck-rehab wing. The truck area was bigger and more open, forty feet long and thirty wide, with a thirty-foot ceiling; it smelled of diesel and welding fumes. A row of red toolboxes sat at the back, and an electric heater was mounted high on one wall and glowed down over a burgundy Peterbilt. Three men were clustered around the open door of the truck, peering inside, and one of them asked, "What the fuck were they carrying in there? You think there was some acid dripping in there?"

"I don't know… " Then one of the men saw Lucas and Del, and nudged the heavyset man who was deepest into the truck. He backed up, saw them, stood upright, and asked, "Can we help you fellas?"

"We're with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Lucas said. Del held up an ID case. "We need to talk to Gene Calb."

"That's me… I'll be with you in just a second." He turned to one of the other men. "I don't know, Larry. I'd go after it with a grinder, and if you don't get good metal… we'll cut another piece off a wreck and weld 'er in. There's a hulk down in Worthington, out of a fire, oughta work."

"Looks like it's rotten all the way to the bottom. I could push a nail through it," said an emaciated man in oil-stained Mr. Goodwrench coveralls.

"Well, cut through it and find out."

Calb shook his head as he turned to Lucas and Del. "The whole floor of the passenger side is eaten away. Not the driver's side, just the passenger side. It's not rust, exactly, but it's rotten. Like they spilled acid on it or something and then let it soak for a few years."

One of the other men said, "Cat pee? Cat pee'll rot holes in hardwood floors."

"Well, Jesus, how could he stand the smell?" Calb shook his head once more. "If I were you, Larry, I'd keep my hands out of it."

"You sure as shit can count on that," said the man called Larry.

TO LUCAS AND Del, Calb said, "C'mon this way, fellas. We'll go back to my office. You want to know about Deon? I already talked to some of you guys. With the BCA, right?"

"We're doing a little back-checking," Lucas said. "How well did you know Mr. Cash?"

They pushed through a door into another small office and Calb gestured at a couple of guest chairs, then settled behind his desk as he answered. A caution flag signed by Richard Petty, and a Snap-on tools calendar from the 1980s hung on a wall. Everything else was parts books.

"He worked for me," Calb said earnestly, leaning across the desk to Lucas. He had a big head and a blunt nose and square, mildly green teeth the size of Chiclets-the face of a plumber or a carpenter or a character actor playing a hardworking joe. "We weren't friends. An old Army buddy down in KC asked me if I could get him a driver's job. I knew he was just out of jail and, tell you the truth, I'm not sure he was that much reformed. With what's happened, it looks like he wasn't."

"What do you think happened?" Del asked.

Calb said, "Well-you know. Somebody took him out and hung him. I know it wasn't none of my boys, because none of my boys could do that. Jane too, killing both of them. I think it's gotta come out of KC. He was in jail, that's what it's gotta be. Somebody back there."

"How about Jane Warr?" Lucas asked. "How well did you know her?"

"Not real well. She didn't hang around or anything. She came up with Deon, from KC. She wasn't much-she was a card dealer up at Moose Bay, I'm sure you know."

"So… were they renting that house? Own it? What was the situation there?"

"They bought it, cheap-thirty-six thousand, I think. Then they fixed it up. Joe Kelly did some of the work, he'd once worked as a handyman, and they had a couple guys in from town, they did some of it."

"There are rumors around town that she might have had a relationship with a guy up at the casino," Del said.

"I wouldn't know about that," Calb said, shaking his head. "Like I said, she wasn't that bright, but I don't think she'd be dumb enough to play around on Deon. Deon had a mean streak. That's why he was in jail. If he'd found out something like that, he would have beat on her like a big bass drum."

"Mmm."

Calb picked up a piece of paper from his desk, something with a printed IRS seal, looked at it, flicked it off to the side. "Then there's the whole thing about Joe. Joe's gone-and nobody knows where he went. Never said a word to anyone. One day he was here, and the next day, he wasn't. He was from KC, too."

"You think it might be possible that Joe did this? That there was some kind of an argument, and for some reason… "

Calb shook his head. "Nah. To tell you the truth, Joe just didn't have the grit to do this. Not hanging them, where he had to look them in the face."

"So maybe he just took off," Del said. "Or maybe… "

"Something else I thought of, after the other BCA boys was here," Calb continued. "If this whole thing didn't come out of the Kansas City jail-and that's gotta be it, in my opinion, but if it didn't-then you oughta get up to Moose Bay. That would be the place to look, along with KC."

"Why?" Del asked.

"The word around town is that Letty West saw them out there at the stroke of midnight," Calb said. "Is that right?"

Lucas nodded. "Close to that."

"Jane worked the three-to-eleven shift. She couldn't have got home much before half-past eleven, and last night, with that ground blizzard, it was probably later. If he took them up there to hang them at midnight, he must have grabbed her the minute she got home. So he was waiting for her-or followed her home."

Lucas and Del both nodded. They talked for another five minutes, and Lucas got the impression that Calb was genuinely confused by the killings. Cash had had some words from time to time with coworkers, but never anything serious, nothing that had even led to a confrontation. "Just that, you know, mechanics and guys like Deon don't mix. He thought he was a basketball star. One of those bad gangsta dudes, whatever they call them. That's what he thought."

OUTSIDE, WALKING BACK across the highway, Lucas said, "I thought about her getting off at eleven, and being hanged at twelve."

"I did too," Del said. "I was saving it up."

"Pig's ass," Lucas said. "Anyway, somebody thought of it."

"Maybe Warr was the target," Del said. "We've been doing nothing but talking about Cash."

"Got to get on her, get some background going. I'll talk to Dickerson."

"Gotta get up to Moose Bay," Del said. "How's the heater in the Olds?"

"Fine."

"Then let's take your car. Mustang heater wouldn't soften up butter."

MOOSE BAY WAS run by the Black River band of the Chippewa, on the banks of a river whose water was stained so absolutely black by decomposing vegetation that when it froze over, even the ice looked black. From Cash's house to the res was twenty-four minutes, nine minutes down to Armstrong, then another fifteen minutes through Armstrong and out the county road to the casino.

"Tell me your theories," Del said, on the way out. "You give good theory."

"I'm thinking… drug deal," Lucas said. "Calb was probably right both ways: it's connected with Kansas City and Cash's jail contacts, and it's probably connected with the casino. The casino Indians don't have much truck with drugs, but the people who come in to gamble, have a good time… they'd do a little coke."

"So the money's drug money," Del said. "All in cash, all bundled up, but not fresh bricks. Cash makes the wholesale contacts, driving for Calb back and forth. Warr has the contacts up here, delivers it out to the individual dealers. Or deals it herself."

"Then they fuck with somebody. Or, somebody knows they've got that money, and they come looking for it."

"But then they'd just shoot them-they wouldn't hang them," Del said.

"Trying to get them to talk?"

"More likely they fucked with somebody and got made an example of," Del said. "A bigger network that's still up and running, where they need an occasional example."

"Maybe," Lucas said. "Where does Calb come in?"

"He doesn't. Not necessarily."

"Look at the farmhouse-there was a lot of work done in there, new work, and it cost a bundle. Believe me, I know." The Big New House back in St. Paul had cost $870,000. "If Calb knows Cash is only getting paid for driving, and if Warr is just dealing cards, where'd he think they got the money to fix that place up? There's a hundred grand in work in there, minimum, and a ten-thousand-dollar television set."

"Tell you what-if the total's a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, that's not much for a house, with two incomes, and a guy upstairs who might be paying rent," Del said.

"C'mon," Lucas scoffed. "How many drug dealers do you know who have a mortgage? How many have bought a house?"

"Jimmy Szuza bought a house for his mother."

"Jimmy Szuza was working for his mother, the treacherous old bitch. He was fronting for her."

"Still." After a couple of minutes: "And what about the cell?"

"Beats the shit outa me."

"CALB WAS RIGHT about the travel time," Lucas said, glancing at his watch as they rolled into the casino's parking lot.

The casino looked like a larger version of Calb's truck shop, but a truck shop on steroids: a huge, rambling, two-story yellow-and-green metal building with a prism-shaped glass entry built to resemble a crystal tepee. "Liquor in the front, poker in the rear," Del said.

"Bumper sticker," Lucas said. "But I don't think they sell booze."

THE MOOSE BAY security chief was a cheerful Chippewa man named Clark Hoffman, who hurried down to meet them after a call from the reception desk. "Figured you'd get here sooner or later," he said, shaking their hands. He looked closely at Del. "Did you hang out at Meat's in the Cities?"

"Yeah, I'd go in there before it closed," Del said.

"It closed? Shit."

"Couple years back."

Hoffman thought about that for a moment, then said, "I used to kick your ass at shuffleboard. I thought you were a wino."

Del grinned and shrugged. "I remember. You told me you were at Wounded Knee."

"That's me," Hoffman said. "Sneaking through the weeds with a hundred pounds of frozen brats in a backpack. Fuckin' FBI-no offense. C'mon this way."

They followed him upstairs to his office, Del filling him in about Meat's. "Trouble with the health inspectors," Del told him. "You name it, they had it: mice, rats, roaches, disease. The only thing that kept you from dyin' was the alcohol."

"Everything did have a… particular flavor," Hoffman said. "Ever notice that?"

"Yeah."

"I always sorta liked it. What happened to Meat?"

"He moved to San Clemente and opened a porno store."

"Not much money in retail porno anymore," Hoffman said, shaking his head. "Not since they started piping it into every motel room in the country."

JANE WARR'S EMPLOYMENT file sat in the center of Hoffman's desk. He pushed it across at Lucas and said, "Not much there. She learned to deal at a school in Vegas, held a couple of jobs there, worked at a Wal-Mart for a while, outside of Kansas City, then came up here."

"We heard a rumor that she might have had a relationship here with a guy named Terry Anderson."

Hoffman frowned. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Downtown. Can't tell you exactly who mentioned it," Lucas said.

"I'll check, and I'll find out. I hadn't heard anything, but then-I might not have. About anyone else, but not about Terry."

"Why not Terry?" Del asked.

"He's my brother-in-law," Hoffman said. He grinned at Lucas, but it wasn't a happy face. "He's married to my sister."

"Aw, shit," Lucas said. "Listen, all we heard was one guy, who didn't like Warr, but maybe got turned down by her and knew we'd be up here talking to you. Maybe just a wise guy."

"One way or the other, I'll know in the next half hour," Hoffman said. He interlinked his fingers, stretched his arms out in front of him, and cracked his knuckles. "I'll let you know."

"Take it easy," Del said.

"I'll take it easy," Hoffman said. "My sister, on the other hand, might kill his ass. If it's true."

"Tell her to take it easy, too," Del said. "I mean, Jesus."

"You have any cocaine going through here?" Lucas asked after an awkward pause.

Hoffman spread his hands. "Sure. On the res, and some of the customers bring it in. We try to keep it out-we make so much money that we try to keep everything spotless. We don't need to give some asshole state senator an excuse to build state-run casinos. When we see it, we call the cops. Anybody caught with it is banned, no matter what the cops do."

"Any chance Warr was dealing?" Del asked.

"Not in here," Hoffman said. "We watch the dealers, and they know it. We tape them every minute they're working."

"Really? Do you still have last night's tapes?" Lucas asked.

"Sure do. We've got tapes for the last month, and tapes of anything that might ever come up in the future. Catch people stealing, they'll be on tape until the next glacier comes through."

Del said, "We don't have a line on who did this, but we'd sort of like to see a guy, big guy, new beard, dark watch cap or ski cap, dark parka and jeans, drives a Jeep Cherokee."

"I don't know about the Cherokee, but I know who you're talking about. We've got him on tape," Hoffman said.

"You know him?" Lucas asked. "Who he is?"

"Not who he is, but I looked at him pretty good. He'd be on the tapes, though most of what you'd see is the top of his head. The camera coverage on the slots isn't as good as it is on the tables, because the slots aren't as much of a problem."

"When can we see them?" Lucas asked. And, "How do you know it was him?"

"Right now. And I know who you're talking about, because some people don't act right, and you tend to notice them. This guy wasn't interested in gambling. I couldn't tell what he was interested in. I noticed him the night before last, and then he came in again last night," Hoffman said. "He was plugging dollar tokens into the slots, but slow, and he hardly paid attention when he won, like he didn't care. People don't act like that in casinos. They're always walking around counting their coins and looking at machines, or they get perched up on a chair and they start pounding away. One thing they don't do, is they don't not give a shit."

Del looked at Lucas. "Hell of a long thread, from the motel guy to here."

"Gotta pull it," Lucas said. To Hoffman: "Let's go see the tapes."

Hoffman took them to a surveillance room-on the way, he asked, "You really think your info on Terry might be good?" and Lucas said, "Jeez, I hope not"-where a half-dozen women roamed along twenty monitors, watching the activity on the floor below. There were good overhead shots of all the blackjack tables, but most of the cameras over the slots looked straight down. Only a few looked at the slots from shallow angles, and those were farther back.

"The main problem with the machines is theft-guys dipping coins out of other people's coin buckets," Hoffman explained. He pointed at a monitor showing a woman who was sitting in front of a machine feeding in quarters. All they could see was the top of her head, her shoulders, and her arms. "See, like this lady, she's pushed her coin bucket halfway around the machine. If you're on the next aisle over, you can reach across and dip her. We get one of those a week, guys who never think about cameras. Dumb guys. But you can't see them dipping from the side. You can only see them reach from the overheads."

He led them to a cubicle at the back of the room, where an Indian man with two careful red-ribbon-tied braids was poking at a computer. "Les, are we still on last night's tapes on Number Twelve?"

"Yeah. That's good for another couple of days." The man looked curiously at Lucas and Del.

"State police," Hoffman said. "Looking into the Jane Warr thing."

"Hanged," Les said. He toyed with the end of one of his braids. "That sort of freaked me out when I heard it. She won't be on Twelve, though… "

"We're looking for another fella. Go to ten o'clock. Start there."

The computer guy typed in a group of codes, and they waited, fifteen seconds, then twenty, and finally a wide-angled color film came up. The people in the film moved in a herky-jerky motion, indicating that the camera was shooting at a super-slow rate. "There he is," Hoffman said, tapping the camera.

The camera was looking down a long row of slots from slightly above. Two-thirds of the way down the row, a tall man in a dark coat, watch cap, and glasses was playing one of the machines.

"Can we get a closer shot of him?" Lucas asked.

"Not from that camera-we could have zoomed in if we thought he was up to something, but he never did anything," Hoffman said. "I just noticed him when I was down there because he didn't seem right. I forgot about his glasses, though."

"How about another camera?"

"The overhead won't help, but we've got a camera coming across from the side, but it's gonna be partly blocked by the machines."

"Number twenty-eight," Les said. "I can get it if you want it."

"Get it," Lucas said.

Number twenty-eight showed slices of the man's face, only marginally more clearly than the first camera. "Is that the best there is?"

"Probably got him walking in or out on number thirty-six, but I don't know when he arrived. Leaving, we'd only get the back of his head… It'd take some time. I don't know how much better the shot would be," Hoffman said.

"We could take the flashes we got of him on twenty-eight, freeze the shots, and then stitch them together and we'd have his whole face," Les said. "I could do it in Photoshop."

"How long would that take?"

"I don't know. I've never done it, but I think I could. I could print the best partial shots, too."

"Let's try it all," Lucas said to Hoffman. "We can get a subpoena to make it all legal."

"That'd be good," Hoffman said. "It'd help publicity-wise, if somebody asks-but we could get started right away. Look, look where he keeps looking."

"What?"

Hoffman tapped the monitor. "See, he keeps looking over the top of the machine, sideways. That's where Jane is. She's out of the picture, but he keeps looking over there. Here comes Small Bear… "

A woman pushing a change cart moved into the picture. When she got to the man, she stopped and spoke to him. He nodded, took out his wallet and gave her a bill. She gave him a stack of coins, said a couple more words, then pushed on down the aisle.

"Who's that?"

"JoAnne Small Bear. Been working here since we opened."

"We need to talk to her," Lucas said. "We're gonna need all the tape you've got of this guy. Even the overheads. He might be wearing a ring or a watch, and that could be a good thing to know."

Hoffman nodded. "Sure. I'll have Les pull out everything we've got. You're a hundred percent sure it's him?"

"No. Only about ninety percent," Lucas said. "Ninety and climbing."

"How about this Small Bear?" Del asked. "Where can we get her?"

Hoffman looked at his watch. "She's gotta be checked in by now-she works the three-to-eleven. Let's go find her."

JOANNE SMALL BEAR looked nothing at all like a bear-she looked more like a raspberry. Barely five feet tall, she was jolly and fat, with black eyes and brilliant white teeth; she wore boot-cut jeans with a western shirt and a turquoise necklace. She remembered the man in the watch cap. "He looked lonely and sad," she said. "Pretty good-looking, though. Polite."

"Any particular characteristics that might tell us about him?" Del asked.

"Maybe," she said. "You think he killed Jane Warr?"

"We need to talk to him," Lucas said.

"Jane was a big pain in the ass," Small Bear said.

"You don't hang people for being a pain in the ass," Del said. "You wouldn't have wanted to see her this morning when they cut her down."

Small Bear exhaled and said, "I know one thing that might be important. When he opened his billfold to give me some bills, I saw that he had a black card. One of those American Express black cards."

Del looked at Lucas and Lucas shrugged.

Small Bear looked from Lucas to Del to Lucas and said, "You don't know about the black cards?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Lucas said.

"We get every card in the world in here," Hoffman said. "The black card is called the Centurion Card. To get one, you gotta spend a hundred and fifty thousand bucks a year with American Express. I bet there aren't a hundred of them in Minnesota."

"You're kidding me," Lucas said. "A hundred and fifty thousand a year?"

"That's what I hear."

Del said to Lucas, "That ought to narrow the list."

LUCAS STEPPED AWAY, took out his cell phone, found a slip of paper with Neil Mitford's personal cell-phone number and punched it in. Mitford answered on the second ring: "This is Davenport. Things are moving here. We could have a photo and maybe a name pretty quick-but we need some help."

"What?"

"We need somebody to get to American Express. Maybe there's a local office or a local official we can give a subpoena to, but we need all the names of all the Centurion Card members from Minnesota and the Kansas City area. Maybe somebody could feed them a list of ZIP codes. We need it quick as we can."

"Wait a minute, let me jot this down." After a second of silence, Mitford said, "What the fuck is a Centurion Card?"

"Some kind of exclusive card," Lucas said. "The casino people say they're pretty rare."

"I'll find out the fastest way to do it, and get it to you."

"See if you can get a printable list from them, and fax it to the sheriff's office here. And tell them, you know, it involves a multiple murder. Put a little heat on them."

"I can do heat," Mitford said. "I'll call you."

HOFFMAN HAD WALKED away while Lucas was talking; when he got off the phone, Del said, "Hoffman's gone to get Anderson. His brother-in-law."

"Damnit. I would have liked to have been there, see how the guy takes it."

"He went over there… he said he'd be right back, maybe we could catch him."

THEY FOUND HOFFMAN and Anderson just outside an employee's canteen off the main floor. Anderson was a thin, dark-haired white man with big crooked teeth and a small narrow mustache. He was waving his arms around, his face harsh and urgent, as he talked to Hoffman, who leaned against a wall with his arms crossed. Lucas heard, "Goddamnit, Clark, you know me better than that, I just ate lunch… "

Lucas came up, with Del trailing, and said, "There you are."

Hoffman turned and pushed away from the wall. To Anderson he said, "These are the cops."

Anderson pushed a finger at Lucas: "What the hell are you doing, telling Clark that I've been cheating on Suzie?"

"Didn't exactly say that," Lucas said. "We heard from a guy in town that you were pretty friendly with Jane Warr."

"What guy?"

"Can't tell you, unless we bust you. Then you'd have a right to know," Lucas said, hardening up. "Your lawyer could get the name."

Anderson shriveled back. "My lawyer? What the hell is going on?"

Del edged in, the beat-up good guy. "Listen: just tell us-how well did you know her?"

"I wasn't screwing her, if that's what you mean."

"How well?" Del pressed.

Anderson took a step back, and the stress in his voice dropped a notch. "A little bit. She used to deal in Vegas and I worked out there for a while, years ago. I didn't know her then-we weren't even there at the same time-but you know, working in Vegas was sort of a big deal for both of us. When we were both off at the same time, we'd eat lunch together, here in the canteen, sometimes. But most of the time, just in a group, only once or twice, when there was just the two of us." He looked at Hoffman: "Clark, I wouldn't bullshit you."

"All right," Hoffman said.

Del said, "Did you ever meet any of her friends, Deon Cash or Joe Kelly?"

"I didn't really meet them, but I knew who they were, because they were black," Anderson said. To Hoffman: "That's another reason I wouldn't do it, Clark. Even if I'd wanted to. You ever see her boyfriend? The guy was like some kind of ghetto killer or something."

"All right," Hoffman said again.

"She ever say anything about them?" Lucas asked. "Or was she worried about anything? Did she seem apprehensive, or scared?"

"A few weeks back, I don't know, three or four weeks, the Joe guy took off. Or disappeared. She didn't know where he went, she said he just vanished. She was pretty worried about him, but that's all I know. She never did say if he ever showed up."

"She seemed scared about it?"

Anderson dipped his chin, thinking, scratched his head, straightened his hair-a little relieved grooming, Lucas thought-and said, "Maybe scared. Sort of more freaked out, like when you find out something weird about someone. Like if somebody told you your best friend was a child molester, or something."

"Did you see a guy watching her last night? A big guy."

"Wasn't here last night. I was out with my wife," Anderson said, leaning on the wife.

"Okay," Lucas said. "Tell me this: how much coke was she pushing out on the floor here?"

"What?"

"Cocaine," Del said.

Anderson looked at them like they were crazy. "She wasn't dealing cocaine. No way. I woulda known about that. You get a bunch of dealers and one of them is pushing, everybody knows. There was nothing like that about Jane."

"She use it?" Lucas asked.

Anderson's eyes flicked away. "Maybe… I never saw her use it." He unconsciously rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "But she used to get a little cranked, and once or twice I thought she might've gone back to the ladies' can and done something."

"You didn't tell us," Hoffman said.

"I didn't know," Anderson said. "Hell, you even hint at something like that around here, and the next thing you know, somebody's looking for a job. And I kinda liked her."

"But not too much," Hoffman said.

"No. Jesus, Clark." Then his eyes narrowed, and he turned to Lucas. "Did that asshole Bud Larson put you on me?"

Lucas kept his face straight and shook his head. "Haven't heard any Larsons mentioned," he said. "Why?"

"Nothin'," Anderson said. To Hoffman: "He was the guy who complained that we cold-decked him. Last week? Mean-looking guy?"

Del looked at Lucas and shook his head.

WHEN THEY WERE finished with Anderson-still a worried man, despite Hoffman's assurances that he believed him-they went looking for other employees who remembered the big man. Les, the computer operator, brought down the first printout of the man's face: it was fuzzy, but would be recognizable in context.

Nobody else remembered talking to him.

By the time they finished talking with other employees, Les had saved a dozen shots of the man, and two stitched-together composites, to a CD that could be opened on any PC with the Imaging program, which he said was most of them.

"We still need the actual tapes," Lucas told him.

"We're pulling them; we'll hang on to them," he said.

THEY'D BEEN IN the casino for an hour and a half when Mitford called back. "We're running with Amex. They accepted a faxed subpoena and they're putting the list together now. They say they'll have it in half an hour. I'm having copies faxed to the sheriff's office up there, and another one down here. They say there might be a couple hundred names."

"We'll head downtown," Lucas said. "I've got a CD with some photos on it."

"We'd like to see some down here."

"I'll e-mail them to you. You gonna be there?"

"Until you guys go to bed," Mitford said. "Washington just had a press conference in Grand Forks and he says the law enforcement agencies must be complicit in this crime-I'm reading this-either actually or morally. Then… ah, blah blah blah. I think he's on his way up there to have a rally."

"Yeah? In Armstrong? Who's gonna rally?"

"I don't know. I'm just telling you what he says."

"I'll get back to you," Lucas said.

On the way out, they thanked Hoffman, agreed that Anderson probably hadn't been playing around on his sister, and made arrangements to have the videotapes picked up by a BCA crime scene man.

"SO WE GOT a face and a few hundred names," Del said. He looked at his watch. "You think we'll get him by midnight?"

"We're rolling," Lucas said. "And I'll tell you what: he left enough stuff on the bodies that when we identify him, we've got him. I'd bet that hair was his, I bet that blood on Warr's face was his."

"Could be Cash's."

"Not dripping down like that. It was fresh when she was hanging."

"God bless DNA," Del said.

ON THE WAY back to town, Lucas called Dickerson and filled him in. Then, "Did you get anything out of that motel room? Fingerprints, hair, anything?"

"We've got an ocean of fingerprints, but we've also got some places that appear to have been wiped," Dickerson said. "I wouldn't get your hopes up."

"Did you hear anything from St. Paul about tracking down the Cherokee?"

"If you go back a month, you can find maybe thirty Cherokee transactions in Minnesota. We've got the names on those, and we're working with North and South Dakota, Missouri and Iowa. I think Iowa's in, haven't gotten word from the others yet. I'm not sure South Dakota is computerized enough to get what we need that quick."

"Let's get what we can."

ABUNCH OF cops were leaning on the wall outside the Law Enforcement Center, smoking, when Lucas and Del pulled into the parking lot. Lucas had just gotten out of the car when his cell phone rang.

"Yeah?"

"Lucas, it's Neil. I got the list on those cards down here, and it'll be up there in the next couple of minutes. I don't think you have to waste a lot of time checking it out."

"Why not?"

" 'Cause I think I know who it is."

"What?"

"There's a guy on the list named Hale Sorrell. You remember him?"

"Sorrell? He's… oh, shit."

Del said, "What?"

Lucas ignored him, and asked Mitford, "Do you know him?"

"Yeah. I once tried to get him to give some money to our guy, on the basis that our guy was a rational conservative Democrat. Sorrell wasn't buying; he's a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Seemed like an okay guy. Shitload of money from Medlux."

"Big guy, but not fat, big shoulders, dark hair, middle forties, glasses, this guy had a recent beard… "

"I don't know if he wears glasses, but he's at an age where he might. He's forty-six. He could grow the beard. Everything else is right on."

"I'm gonna e-mail you a photo. Maybe a couple of them," Lucas said. "Gimme an address."

"WHAT?" DEL ASKED, when Lucas rang off. "We got him?"

"Maybe," Lucas said. "Hale Sorrell? You remember?"

Del thought for a moment, then a light flared behind his eyes. "Oh, shit."

"That's what I said. Let's get this list. Maybe they got a T1 or a DSL line out of here, we can send the photos from here."

THEY CROSSED THE parking lot at a half-trot. One of the deputies pushed away from the wall and said, "Chief Davenport… you remember me?"

Lucas slowed down. He did remember the deputy, more or less. He'd beaten up the guy's partner a few years before, in a different county, but not too far away. "Yeah, I do," Lucas said. "What happened, you take a transfer?"

"Moved over here when Sheriff Mason retired. My folks live over here. Anyway, have you seen the TV? The news?"

"No. Bad?"

"Pretty bad. That little girl, Letty, she was terrific, but man, they took some pictures of those people hanging in the trees, and they're everywhere. They were on the CBS and ABC and NBC evening news, and they're on CNN almost full-time. They got video of the bodies sort of swinging in the wind."

"Aw, Christ."

"Then that Washington guy gave a talk down in Grand Forks and they had this video picture behind him with the bodies hanging, and it looked like he was standing in there with them, and he was screaming about lynching."

"Maybe we better figure this out in a hurry."

"I'm pretty sure you can do it," the deputy said. "I been telling the guys about you."

"Not too much, I hope," Lucas said.

"Yeah, I told them that part," the deputy said. "That's the best part. Uh, whatever happened to the girl? The girl that come up with you?"

"Marcy Sherrill. She's a lieutenant in Minneapolis, now. She runs the Intelligence unit."

"Really… jeez." The deputy was impressed.

"Gotta go," Lucas said. "Nice talking to you again."

As he and Del went inside, he heard the deputy's voice, "… got a pair of knockers on her like muskmelons and… "

"You got groupies," Del said.

"Groupie with a good eye for knockers," Lucas said, amused. "Muskmelons… those are cantaloupes, right?"

THE SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT had a fast line out. Anderson and a dozen other cops were in the building when Lucas and Del arrived, and came out to meet them. "Something happen?"

"We might have a name," Lucas said. "We need to send some pictures to St. Paul, right now."

Anderson's jaw dropped. He stood like that for a moment, looked at a deputy who'd trailed him in, and then said, "Well, Jiminy, who is it? You mean a name for the killer?"

"Possibly. Know in a minute, if I can get an Internet connection on a computer with a CD drive."

"I got one in my office."

Lucas followed him back to a big wood-paneled office with a blue high-pile carpet, seven-foot mahogany desk and a wall full of photographs. The sheriff with local politicians, his wife, his children, other sheriffs, cops. A computer sat on a side-table with an Aeron chair in front of it. Lucas dropped into the chair, brought up the computer, slipped the CD into the CD tray, and called up a Qwest connection. Ten seconds later, the best of the stitched photos was on its way to St. Paul; a minute later, another was on its way. Six deputies were crowded into the office now, and Lucas thought about the other BCA crew. He punched in Dickerson's number.

"Dickerson… "

"This is Davenport. Where are you?"

"Just outside of Armstrong. Thinking about heading home."

"We got a name. We're down at the sheriff's office. If the name is good, it ties together a lot of stuff. The money, the cell in the basement."

"What's the name?"

"Hale Sorrell."

Long pause. "Oh, shit."

"HALE SORRELL?" ANDERSON demanded when Lucas rang off. "You mean the Rochester guy?"

Lucas nodded, leaned back in the chair, crossed his legs. "Daughter was kidnapped last month and never came back," he said. "We're not sure yet, but it's a possibility."

"You got pictures of him?" one of the deputies asked.

"We've got these pictures," Lucas said, tapping a photograph on the monitor screen. "They're not good, but they might be good enough. Once we get a solid maybe, and some DNA returns back from the medical examiner, then we'll know."

"That means his kid is out at… might have been at… her… "

"She might still be out there, somewhere, at the house," Lucas said.

"Did you know Sorrell was from up here, originally?" one of the deputies asked. "I mean, not right here, but down to Red Lake Falls? His father still lives down there, somewhere. He's in a nursing home or something."

Lucas said: "That's interesting. Maybe somebody around here set him up?"

"Could be, I guess."

Another deputy said, "Maybe he was fooling around with somebody. Red Lake Falls is pretty much known for its beautiful women."

"That's always a useful piece of information."

LUCAS'S CELL PHONE rang and the governor was there. "Lucas. Neil brought me up to date on this Hale Sorrell thing. I know him pretty well, I looked at the pictures."

"What do you think?"

"Neil and I agree. It sure looks like him. Not positive, but boy, it sure looks like him."

"We have a lot of DNA, sir. If we can get somebody to officially point the finger, we could get a warrant for some DNA samples and settle it."

"The devil's gonna be in the details. We don't want to be wrong. If we had to, is there any way you could hang this on the sheriff up there?"

"The sheriff's a pretty sharp guy, sir," Lucas said, looking up at Anderson, who appeared confused, and mouthed at Lucas, Who is it? Lucas went back to the phone. "I think we could probably work something out, if we had to-but before we do anything official, I'd like to get some good photos of Sorrell, put them in a photo spread and show them to a woman up here who actually talked to him. If she IDs him, we'd be on solid ground asking for the DNA."

"That sounds good. I'll get McCord on it right now. There've got to be some publicity shots around. He's served on committees and so forth. Can we transmit them up to you?"

"I think so. You'll have to talk to the local people, I don't know exactly what the printing facilities are here… hang on." He took the phone down and asked, "Do we have a photo printer of some kind?"

One of the deputies said, "Sure. We've got two or three different kinds. Standard stuff."

Back to the phone: "We're good, sir. When your guys find a photo, send it up here to the sheriff's department."

"We can do that," Henderson said. "Man, you moved fast-this is exactly what I wanted. That asshole Washington hasn't even gotten out of Grand Forks yet. He's supposedly going up to the hanging tree to make a speech."

"Sir, we can't let that happen. It's really a bleak place-it looks like it was invented for a hanging. The image'll be so strong that nothing else will make any difference, nothing we say. Maybe we could keep him out of there on the grounds that it's a crime scene."

"Can we blame that on the sheriff, too?"

"I think it could be worked out, sir."

"Is he right there, listening?"

"Yes, sir."

"Let me talk to him. Say something that would lead to me talking to him."

Lucas nodded. "I think you should talk to Sheriff Anderson about that, sir."

"Good. Give him the phone."

Lucas passed the phone to Anderson, saying, "The governor. He needs to speak with you."

Anderson took the phone. "Uh, Governor Henderson… "

As Anderson talked, Lucas said to the group of deputies, "Is there somebody here who usually handles photo spreads? We'll need a half-dozen pictures of white men with dark hair, probably in business suits, looking charming. Like a political picture." He looked around at the pictures on the walls. "Like these. Like that one." He pointed a finger at a smiling head.

One of the deputies said, "We got that."

The rest of it took an hour and a half. Lucas was in a semi-frenzy, driven by the momentum of the day, and Dickerson arrived, running hot with lights and siren, wanting to be there if it all cracked open. Forty minutes after Lucas talked to the governor, the sheriff's ID division took the transmission of two recent photos of Hale Sorrell, one a formal portrait, the other taken at a press conference after the disappearance of his daughter.

A deputy put together two different photo spreads: one of dark-haired white men in informal situations, another of dark-haired white men in formal poses. Then he retransmitted all the dummy photos to himself, so they'd be printed on the same paper and have the same general look.

Hoffman was still on the job at the casino. Small Bear was on the floor, he said, pushing her change cart.

"Keep her there," Lucas said. "We're on the way."

LUCAS, DEL, AND Dickerson went with Anderson in a sheriff's truck, a comfortable GMC Yukon XL with a big heater. At the casino, Hoffman met them at the door. "Small Bear's upstairs," he said. "How're we doing?"

"Gonna find out," Lucas said.

Small Bear was sitting at a table in a conference room, her hands folded in front of her, looking a little frightened. Lucas explained quickly: "We have two sets of photos. We're gonna show you one set, then ask if you see the man who was here last night, and then we'll show you the other set. Okay?"

She nodded. Lucas spread the informal photos in front of her. She looked at them, slowly, slowly, pushing one after another away from her, until finally she was left only with Sorrell's. "I think this might be him. Not a very good picture."

"Okay." Lucas scooped up the deck of photos, put them back in the brown envelope they came in, opened a second envelope, and took out the formal shots. This time, Small Bear didn't hesitate.

"I'm pretty sure this is him," she said, tapping the photograph of Sorrell.

They all stood in silence, nobody moving, nothing audible but some breathing, and then Anderson groaned, "Jiminy," and Lucas turned and looked at Del.

Del nodded. "Got him."